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YU YU HAKUSHO #12 -- Watch & Learn

I got such sick enjoyment out of watching this dweeb get bullied.

Making Rando as dweebish as Butters from SOUTH PARK was a stroke of brilliance.
I thoroughly enjoyed watching him get beaten up.

The tables do eventually get turned on Kuwabara in a way that scarily
recalls something Lewis Carroll might’ve dreamed up, sure, but the portions
where these bullies kick this runt around like a bag of jellybeans (?!) offered
some of the most satisfying guilty pleasure in any show I’ve seen in a while.
Yeah, maybe such an unfair fight would be mildly disgusting in “real life,” but
you’re lying to yourself if you don’t think part of the appeal of this show
lays in the catharsis of getting to root for the bad kids. I love how whatever advantage
Rando ever gets repeatedly crumbles away because he seems to be stupidly
forgetting to stay intense. LOVE IT.

Look, we’ve to another portion of the show that’s more about the procedural
details of the fighting and, while that’s a gas to watch, it’s tough to come up
with much commentary without the insight of Joe Rogan or Dana White. That said,
I’ll take another opportunity to muse on how this show stacks up to sort of
fantasy fiction I’m more familiar with… namely, superhero comics.

Specifically, I’m finding it terribly amusing that Yusuke and Kuwabara
are essentially superheroes by this point. They’ve got their powers (spirit
gun, spirit sword.)They’ve got their costumes (those uniforms look a lot more
colorful than in real life.) What’s missing is some aliases, and that makes all
this demon-fighting business kind of amusing. It’s just these… guys versus
evil. You think they’d be famous by this point, since they’re not taking too
much effort to hide any of this from the public.

Look up this episode, "Rando Rises, Kuwabara Falls" and decide
for yourself, then read my comments on the previous episode here.